PortadaGruposCharlasMásPanorama actual
Buscar en el sitio
Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.

Resultados de Google Books

Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.

Cargando...

While the Music Played: A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in Wwii

por Nathaniel Lande

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
1231,606,798 (3.33)1
Beginning in 1939 prewar Prague, While the Music Played focuses on the story of young Max Mueller, a curious bright romantic--a budding musician, piano tuner, and nascent journalist. Max is on the cusp of adolescence when the Nazi influence invades Prague's tolerant spirit with alarming speed as he struggles to understand the changing world around him. When his father, noted German conductor, Viktor Mueller is conscripted into the German army and finds himself increasingly promoting the Nazi message, Viktor's best friend, noted Czech composer Hans Krasa, protests the occupation in every way he can.… (más)
Ninguno
Cargando...

Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará.

Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.

» Ver también 1 mención

Mostrando 3 de 3
About halfway through this novel, sometime in 1940, the protagonist’s best friend asks him, “Max, exactly how stupid are you?” Since I’d been wondering the same thing for a couple hundred pages, I had to laugh.

Lande aims to tell how the Holocaust unfolded in Czechoslovakia, especially in Terezín (Theresienstadt), but Max Mueller is a rickety vehicle for that story. What fourteen-year-old growing up in Prague during those catastrophic years would not know what the Gestapo did for a living? How can Max, who counts Jews as his closest friends, not know what a rabbi is?

Further, when he asks these pat questions, an adult tells him he’s getting good at conducting interviews. (Max makes his inquiries as a would-be reporter; the power of a free press is a theme that Lande swings at the reader like a two-by-four.) Throw in that pianist Max, before he volunteers (!) to live in Terezín, was somehow, at age twelve, the best piano tuner in Prague; that this job led him to befriend Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi intelligence officer; and that Max’s father, Viktor, a famous orchestra conductor, befriends Heydrich too, gets attached to his staff, and uses his alleged influence to mitigate the Holocaust when he can. I don’t think so.

Lande relies heavily on figures like Heydrich, Winston Churchill, Hitler, the rabbi and thinker Leo Baeck, and Raoul Wallenberg. But the narrative embracing them proceeds without tension or conflict to speak of, in which the villains pull punches right and left, and the characters are opinions, placards without inner lives. Instead of natural dialogue, While the Music Played offers lectures, which is how Max’s cluelessness comes in handy. People are always informing him, and he’s remarkably slow to learn.

It’s not just that the lectures include state secrets, propping up the conceit that places a young boy at the epicenter of history. These information dumps do no service to the themes involved, which include politics, history, the nature of Judaism, and philosophy; the most breathtakingly glib treatment concerns Heydrich. Heydrich’s father was a composer, and Lande invokes that lineage to portray the son as a music lover too, which allows Max to wonder how the man whose passion he shares can also appear to sanction objectionable policies.

The power of music despite degradation and suffering and the disconnect between a cultured Germany and its murderous activities are worthy themes. But Lande could have written them by, say, giving Max a beloved piano teacher who turns out to be a rabid racist and ultranationalist. Rather, the author has chosen to illustrate his themes with historical “stars,” who make up such an improbable constellation, you have the feeling that the novel takes place in an alternate universe.

To return to Heydrich, known as “Hangman Heydrich” by the people he oppressed, Nazi contemporaries described him as “diabolical” and “icy.” Just what you’d expect from one of the two or three most ruthless figures in the Third Reich: the head of the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, a rival security service to the SS, Heinrich Himmler’s organization, with whom Heydrich had a famous power struggle. Heydrich framed top generals to destroy their careers, masterminded Kristallnacht, devised the Einsatzgruppen (the death squads sent east), and convened the top-secret Wannsee Conference, which codified the until-then haphazard policy of the Final Solution and organized its further implementation, a fact that only emerged after the war.

He would never have befriended Max, “bargained” with his father, or even hired him. More likely, he’d have had the Muellers killed, if he sensed free-thinking or disloyalty (and they’re none too swift at dissembling). In any event, he certainly wouldn’t have told Max in summer 1939 that Germany was about to invade Poland, or conveniently dropped the news that the Final Solution was coming, leaving Max, ever breathlessly inquisitive, to wonder what that meant.

While reading, I went back and forth as to whether the narrative intends this innocence, taking a childlike worldview. You have to wonder about a fictional atmosphere in which nobody even thinks about sex, let alone has any; nobody swears; and where nineteen people in twenty have only good intentions. Lande’s characters love (or hate) on sight, escape fist-shaking villains with regularity, succeed at whatever they turn their hands to, and receive much-needed medical supplies and food by pulling invisible strings.

Toward the teenage characters, adults are remarkably pliant and encouraging, acceding to all demands, enlisting them in the fight against Nazism without hesitation, and offering fulsome praise for all they say or do, as with the question about rabbis. But teenagers don’t act the way Lande portrays them and probably wouldn’t recognize themselves in this narrative, whose unreality feels neither whimsical nor compelling.

I think that historical novelists have a duty to history, to grasp what the record means even as they reinterpret it or blur its actuality. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy or alternate history, but this novel fits neither category; and its careless, superficial approach trivializes its subject. ( )
  Novelhistorian | Jan 27, 2023 |
This is a beautifully written, well researched novel about WWII told through the eyes of Max who is a teenager when the novel begins but becomes part of the resistance as the Nazi regime takes over his country. Max and his friends and family all connect through music - at times it is the only way they can keep their sanity in their world gone crazy.

1939 in Prague - Max Mueller lives with his father Viktor, a world famous conductor. He isn't Jewish but has been taught to respect everyone no matter what their religion or heritage. He and his father are very close and his father has instilled the love of music into him and he has become a pianist and is a piano tuner on the side. The two most important people in his life are his best friend David and the girl he is falling in love with, Sophie. As the Nazis invade Prague and change the life that Max has always known, the truths that he has carried since childhood come into conflict. His father gets drafted into the German Army and becomes friends with a high ranking Nazi. As their friend ship continues, Viktor gets more involved in the Nazi party and helping them with their propaganda. Max is confused by this change in his father who had always taught him to be accepting of everyone and he begins to rely more on his friends. After both David and Sophie are sent to live in Terezin which was referred to as a spa area but was actually one of the first concentration camps. Max goes there to live outside the camp through the help of his father's Nazi cronies but he goes into the camp as much as possible to spend time with David and Sophie and to help them and others where he can. This camp was known for known for its relatively rich cultural life, including concerts, lectures, and clandestine education for children. As conditions worsen and people start to disappear on the trains to Auschwitz, Max and David know that the only way there can stay alive is to escape...but is it even possible?

I read a lot of WWII fiction and found this one exceptional. The writing is beautiful, the friendship between Max, David and Sophie is very honest and real and the way that music ties everything together throughout the novel was outstanding. This is a WWII novel that I will long remember. Be sure to have tissue close at hand while you read this book.

Note: Be sure to read the author's notes at the end to see which of the characters in the novel are based on real people and their effect on WWII.

Thanks to the publisher for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own. ( )
  susan0316 | May 31, 2020 |
For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

While the Music Played: A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in WWII by Nathaniel Lande is a historical fiction book following a young German musician throughout World War II. Mr. Lande is an author, journalist, and film maker.

Max Mueller, a teenager blessed with a musical ear, faces a changing world as Germany’s racial laws and war machine impacts the whole world. Max’s father, a famous German conductor, is drafted into the German army for the purposes of Nazi cultural propaganda.

Everyone Max knows is forced to choose sides, his best friends is Jewish, and so is the girl he’s falling in love with. The more the war progresses, Max loses his innocence and his world view, along with what it means to be German.

This is an epic story which spans decades, revolving around the protagonist, Max Mueller, and his experiences mainly during World War II. As with other impressing historical fiction boons, While the Music Played: A Remarkable Story of Courage and Friendship in WWII by Nathaniel Lande is well researched and involves historical figures in the narrative, as well as excerpts from newspapers.

The author follows several people throughout the book, some famous, some well-known, and others are just trudging day to day trying to survive. The author weaves in history whenever is possible, and it seemed to me that he did not take many, if any, literary licenses to make the story move along.

The book is geared towards the YA crowed, and is written that way. One does not have to have much knowledge of history as the author lays it all out in very simple terms. Usually history is not simple, and intertwined. I thought the author chose well as to what to present and omit, as is relevant to the story and to move it along.

The character of Max, a very idealistic boy in a country where nationalism and propaganda were being fed to you daily, was complex and one could certainly tell he is growing up fast, maybe too fast as no 13 year old I know is like him. I like to believe that boys like him existed, and we have some evidence that they did, which I find amazing and cannot even begin to imagine people I know in that kind of situation.

This is a good novel for adults who want a quick, easy and enjoyable read as well as teens who would find something of Max in themselves. I appreciated the ending where the author gives an overview of the war with the benefit of hindsight, as well as recounting the relating between the fictional and historical parts. ( )
  ZoharLaor | May 6, 2020 |
Mostrando 3 de 3
sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Debes iniciar sesión para editar los datos de Conocimiento Común.
Para más ayuda, consulta la página de ayuda de Conocimiento Común.
Título canónico
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Fecha de publicación original
Personas/Personajes
Lugares importantes
Acontecimientos importantes
Películas relacionadas
Epígrafe
Dedicatoria
Primeras palabras
Citas
Últimas palabras
Aviso de desambiguación
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico

Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.

Wikipedia en inglés

Ninguno

Beginning in 1939 prewar Prague, While the Music Played focuses on the story of young Max Mueller, a curious bright romantic--a budding musician, piano tuner, and nascent journalist. Max is on the cusp of adolescence when the Nazi influence invades Prague's tolerant spirit with alarming speed as he struggles to understand the changing world around him. When his father, noted German conductor, Viktor Mueller is conscripted into the German army and finds himself increasingly promoting the Nazi message, Viktor's best friend, noted Czech composer Hans Krasa, protests the occupation in every way he can.

No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca.

Descripción del libro
Resumen Haiku

Debates activos

Ninguno

Cubiertas populares

Enlaces rápidos

Valoración

Promedio: (3.33)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4 1
4.5
5 1

¿Eres tú?

Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing.

 

Acerca de | Contactar | LibraryThing.com | Privacidad/Condiciones | Ayuda/Preguntas frecuentes | Blog | Tienda | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas heredadas | Primeros reseñadores | Conocimiento común | 203,239,613 libros! | Barra superior: Siempre visible